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- Is science the “truth” about the natural world in which we exist?
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- When do we accept the “facts” as being “truth“?
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- When do we dispute these “facts“?
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- When do we challenge the “assumptions“?
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- The way to look at science is not the “product” but the “process“. We should always challenge the “is” and the “is not's” as we strive to learn more. Science is not the mere quantity of opinion, but, the systematic scientific exploration of different opinions.
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-. Science is what we think of as “objective truth“. It is a hypothesis, or, theory, that has been verified with observation, or experiment, or mathematics. Unlike political science, pure science is supposed to be based on “truth“. Political science appears to be based on lies for the most part as we see it today in government.
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-. Well that's the idea.
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-. The thing science does well is to overthrow truth as soon as new evidence contradicts the model that defines it. Any one hypothesis can be supported and taught for years, even decades, before it is overturned by new evidence and new theories. Science evolves with new knowledge.
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-. Ever since Aristotle, Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton , the idea that the universe was eternal and unchanging was the accepted truth. There was no evidence to the contrary. When Einstein developed his equations balancing gravity with the curvature of space-time he needed to add the Cosmological Constant to make the equations agree with the static universe. In that way he could match the assumptions of the times.
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-. When we finally got evidence to the contrary from Hubble's observations that the universe (galaxies) were expanding., the further a galaxy was away from us, the faster it was receding from us. Today this velocity of expansion is known as the Hubble’s Constant.
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--------------------------- Ho = 47,000 miles per hour receding velocity for every million light-years distance.
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--------------------------- Ho = 74.2 kilometers per second per mega parsec
-. Einstein then said the Cosmological Constant was “the biggest blunder of his life“. Ironically, now that evidence has the universe not only expanding with a velocity but a velocity that is accelerating the new observations have put the Cosmological Constant back into the equations again.
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-. Eternity is dynamic and is not static.
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-. Our understanding of reality is constantly changing.
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-. Looking backwards our understanding is 20:20 vision. Truths in physics can succumb to the future's change in vision.
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-. We do not get to scientific truths through consensus. We “all” can be wrong. And, future evidence will prove it so. Science needs consensus to have theories accepted. But, that consensus should be constantly challenged to see if it holds up.
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-. If a theory can make a prediction and observations, or experiment, can substantiate that in fact it was correct then that theory becomes science through a consensus of a community. Then, confidence in theory grows with time and repeated observations.
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-. Every scientific theory becomes founded in a set of assumptions. These assumptions also need to be continuously challenged. For example much of what we believe is that the speed of light is a constant in the vacuum of space.
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-------------------------- c = 670,633 500 miles per hour
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-. What if conditions change in the distant universe and the speed of light traveling through those distances changes. If the speed of light is variable many of our conclusions about the universe are incorrect today.
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- The Big Bang itself is theory derived from Einstein's Theory of Relativity and Hubble's evidence of an expanding universe. Science basically ran the equations backwards to arrive at a Big Bang. The theory got a lot of supporting evidence with the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation. The CMB is the expansion and cooling of the Big Bang over 13 billion years.
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- . You cannot find the truth without an adversary process. Consensus only works over time if not everyone agrees with you. If we are all thinking the same thing , someone is not thinking.
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RSVP, with comments, suggestions, corrections. Index of reviews available ---
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